Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts

Monday, March 17, 2014

Gravitational Waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background?

The cosmologists are a bit wee-weed up over an announcement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics coming up today at Noon, apparently of the detection of gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background by the BICEP2 telescope. It could be sort of a big deal, depending on just what they announce. mcdr.es/PH0DhA

A webcast, "for scientists," is scheduled for 10:45 AM with a press conference to follow at 12:00 PM athttp://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/news_conferences.html

Papers and data to be available at http://bicepkeck.org/ at 10:45 AM

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Real Physics

I've gotten away from the blog "Real Physics" lately, though it was one of the first I had ever engaged. I met it's author, "Lawrence Gage," at a conference hosted by Dr. Anthony Rizzi at Notre Dame several years ago. The blog covers theology (Catholic), literature and current events as much  as physics, but has a good take on things. He's a big Tolkien aficionado as well. The author seems to have gotten away from it, too, though we can hope for a comeback;) Check it out, look through it's archives, you're sure to find something interesting enough to comment on. A little traffic is always encouraging to a blogger.

Also check out the link to Dr. Rizzi who is doing good work through his institute in undoing the current materialist, scientistic culture. He's a top-notch physicist who participated in setting up the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (or LIGO) and worked on experiments included in missions to Mars. He made quite a mark in coming up with first satisfactory relativistic definition of angular momentum in a 1998 notice in Physical Review Letters, a popular account of which was presented in the journal Science (Both articles are unfortunately paywalled, but you might be able to get them through a local college or university. They commonly allow "townies" access to their library computers which are typically logged in to their subscriptions.) A Real Genius.

He has since written a book, "Physics for Realists," which presents his  approach to re-grounding science in a realist metaphysic. There is a brief review of it in The Review of Metaphysics by renowned Catholic philosopher Jude P. Dougherty, Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.